Digital Home Thoughts: Death to VGA Ports! Why Won't They Die Already?

Are you ready for a rant? Here goes: Dell has launched a computer model called the Dell Studio Slim Desktop PC last week, and one of the first things I noticed about it is that it has a VGA port. An analog monitor port. Why won't companies let this connector die? DVI should be the standard monitor connector on every computer out there, and if you need to down-convert to a VGA connector, it's easy to do do with a cheap adaptor. The Dell has the advantage of an HDMI port, which can be converted to a DVI port, but it would seem prudent to keep that HDMI port for other things.

I'm particularly irritated by this issue because last year I bought an HP Slimline computer for my wife, along with an HP w2207 LCD monitor (a 22" monitor running at 1680 x 1050). The problem? The Slimline computer only came with a VGA port! I can't fathom what HP was thinking with that decision - even if they wanted to target consumers who are using analog-only monitors, they can solve that problem with a DVI to VGA adaptor. Plugging in the 22" monitor, I saw what I expected to see: swirly distortions and general fuziness that goes hand in hand with running an analog display port at high resolutions. On a full-sized computer, it's easy enough to solve the problem by installing a new graphics card. On the Slimline, I had to find a low-profile video card, which ended up being an old NVIDIA 6200 I had laying around. It was passively cooled, so no extra noise was added to the machine, but unfortunately it had a tendency to crash Vista with a blue screen of death - which, incidently, is a very hard thing to with the way Vista handles video drivers.

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to fix this crashing problem - and no amount of software tweaking seemed to work - so I pulled out the old video card and put in a new NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS. The problem was that it wasn't passively cooled, and I was extremely leery of adding anything to the computer that made it noisier. I couldn't find any passively-cooled low-profile cards. NVIDIA seems to think that everyone wants great 3D performance and with the 8000 and 9000 series cards, no one makes a passively cooled card that's also low-profile. I was hoping I could run the 8400 GS without the fan running, but I couldn't - the card overheated within the first minute. So now I have a card in there giving me nice DVI quality, but the fan is fairly noisy, which bugs me to no end. And to add insult to injury, the monitor blinks off now and then, as if the video card stops sending the signal - yet there's no driver crash or software-related problem. Could it be the 60 seconds when I ran the card without the fan on? Unlikely, but it's possible.

And none of this would have happened if HP had simply put a DVI port on their Slimline. VGA ports have no place on a modern desktop computer.